The Gale of 1929 Page 17

  When the Turks steamed across the Black Sea in German ships, flying the flag of the Ottoman Empire as they attacked Russia’s major warm-water seaports of Odessa and Sevastopol, Russia declared war on Turkey and Germany. In a fierce attempt to keep Russia’s exit to the Mediterranean open, Britain came to her aid with ships laden with troops. And aboard one of these huge grey ships with the sounds of battle raging around him was young Frank Green.

  Frank’s regiment from Newfoundland were the only ones from North America to fight at Gallipoli. The Dardanelles looked like little more than a tickle to Green and hardly worth fighting over. He wondered how he would react under fire for the first time. He didn’t really get the chance to find out. Frank was one of the many severely wounded during the landing.

  On the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula, under the blaze of guns and with men dying all around him, his wounds were treated by a tired doctor with the blood of dozens of other men on his hands. There was little antiseptic and no anaesthetics. Green did not heal quickly. He was carried on a stretcher, without a blanket, aboard a small ship that made its slow way across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, Egypt. From there, along with hundreds of other maimed and wounded, he was eventually shipped back to England and finally back to Newfoundland, where he recovered from his wounds. Ironically, the British colonel who commanded the First Newfoundland Regiment at Gallipoli was not yet done with the soldiers. Colonel A. L. Hadow was the same man who ordered the regiment across the battlefield at Beaumont Hamel, where most of them would die.

  Frank Green went back to war again in 1917, and again he met with disaster. He left for Europe on the British troopship SS Laurentic. Nearing her destination, the ship collided with two explosive mines off Lough Swilly, in the north of Ireland. It was January 25, 1917. In one hour the vessel went under, and for the next seven hours Green, who had also suffered an injury during the explosion, struggled for survival in the winter waters of the North Atlantic. The lifebelt he was wearing became sodden and threatened to drag him under. He tore it off his chest. Only 121 of the 475 men who had been aboard the Laurentic survived. Frank Green was one of them. He was rescued and, more dead than alive, shipped to an English hospital again.

  Later that winter, still unable to walk, he was taken off a ship in the iced-over harbour of St. John’s. A few nights later he crippled off the train at the Gambo station. News of his arrival had preceded him. His Orangeman brothers from the communities of Dark Cove, Middle Brook, Hare Bay, and Trinity arranged passage along the frozen coast of Bonavista Bay by horse and sled for the wounded soldier. He was taken over frozen bays and forested trails to the tiny hamlet of Shamblers Cove and from there was ferried by boat across Pond Tickle to his home in Greenspond.

  The young man healed quickly in the clear Atlantic air and was soon on his way to Halifax, where he hoped to be sent overseas again. In Halifax he was given sea patrol duties. He went to navigational school and eventually earned a captain’s ticket.

  On the morning of December 6, 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont Blanc, loaded with tons of explosives destined for the war in Europe, collided with the Norwegian ship SS Imo in the narrowest place of Halifax harbour. The collision caused the greatest man-made explosion in history. Two thousand people on ships and around the city were killed in seconds. Nine thousand more were injured, most of them severely. Apart from a temporary hearing loss—in both ears—Frank Green survived without a scratch.

  The First World War was finally over on November 11, 1918. A few months later Frank Green returned to Greenspond.

  * * *

  I felt the stirrings of my fellow schooners in the murky waters of St. John’s harbour. I was tied fore and aft to a slimy wharf on the north side of the harbour. It was evening and the lights from the city were shining on the water. The filthy water stank. The bottom below my barnacled keel was layered with centuries of human discard. Frank Green was not on my deck. The tide had flowed in from the open sea and my deck was level with the dock.

  A man walked across the dock. I could hear the sound of his boots on the wooden wharf. As he approached me I could hear a whining sound coming from a coarse burlap bag he was carrying in his left hand. He rounded the grump to which my fore line was fastened and stopped at the wharf edge. He dropped the bag on the wharf with a thud. The whining increased. Then the man lit a straight-stem pipe and appeared to be studying the water below him. The match flare revealed a rough, unshaven face. He pulled a few times on his pipe. He spat out of the corner of his mouth. A thin cloud of smoke accompanied his saliva. He started to cough and pulled the pipe from his mouth with his right hand and picked up the bag again with his left. The cries smothered inside the burlap were pitiful. My bow lifted uneasily. The man cast the bag high out over the water and walked away. The bag barely cleared my port bow and landed in the dark water with a muffled splash, where it began to sink. The cries from within became screams of terror. The bag went down slowly. The cries became muffled with the deadly water but continued as the bag went down, until all eight pups inside finally drowned.

  Another dark figure with a sure step walked toward me. I would know the step anywhere. It was my master. He was carrying his suitcase in one arm. His other one was filled with brown paper–wrapped packages and I knew we were leaving. Green more jumped than stepped on my deck. He was in a hurry. At his shout light appeared from the flung-open forecastle door. A head appeared in the scuttle and, just below, on the forecastle stairs, another one.

  “Go below and sound the timbers. We are leaving!” shouted Green.

  Sounding the timbers was something Green always ordered whenever we left port for a major sailing. It involved an inspection of my ribs with a hammer. It had been done many times, but the weakness in my fifth rib had never been detected. Maybe this time would be different.

  There was excitement all around the harbour. Shouts came from the different schooners. Rigging creaked and squealed as sails were raised. The heavy splash of mooring lines dropping into the water came to me. The tide had turned and the dirty harbour water was already been sucked out through the Notch. All manner of human refuse went with it. The little Water Sprite floated past my port side. Men scurried about her deck preparing her for sail. The Janie E. Blackwood followed behind her. I had sailed with both schooners many times. Shouts were exchanged across the water.

  “Got yer moorin’ lines tangled, ’ave ’e, b’ys?”

  “’Fraid of a good time along cause ’tis dark, is ’ee, Frank Green?”

  “Seed enough of them townie wemmin yet, b’ys? Sure, dey’re wearin’ more paint dan Jake Feltham’s stage!”

  The man sent below was hammering at my aft timbers. He was in a hurry. The excitement of so many vessels leaving harbour was a tangible thing. The man climbed out of my hold and the cover was slammed down and secured. My lines were let go aft.

  “Decided to keep company wit’ the fleet, have ’ee, b’ys? Better clean yer chimneys before ye hauls ’em aloft on the gants. ’Tis the only way we’ll see ’e from behind!” came from the passing schooners.

  “P’raps ye should stay in ’arbour wit’ the Neptune. Seems like Skipper Job is feared of the dark, too!”

  My bowline was pulled up over the grump and dropped into the black water in the widening space between my starboard side and the grimy wharf. The man forward, who was checking my timbers, wasn’t doing it very well. He wanted to be on deck. The flurry of chores and pent-up excitement between sailors shipping out is the best of times with seamen the world over. The crewman tapped only every second one of my ribs. My foresail was pulled aloft. I lurched away from the dock. The hammer smote upon my fourth rib. Then the man raced topside. And again my weakened knee went undetected. With the excitement of the entire northern fleet of schooners leaving for home it probably would not have made a difference anyway.

  I felt the hand of my master on my helm as I slid out into the
ebbing stream of St. John’s harbour. The lines that had held me to the old seaport for days were neatly coiled—clockwise, or, as they called it, with the sun and never against it—on my deck.

  The foresail followed Green’s shouted order up the mast. It snapped in the wind as it rose aloft and I was under way. Men stood by the mainsail and jib. Green shouted again to “Get the blankets on the bugger,” and with the leaving tide sucking on my keel below and the pull of the wind aloft, I was drawn out into the St. John’s Notch. Pieces of splintered wood and debris floated along by my sides as I went and the grease of the harbour issue accompanied me out to a troubled night sea.

  When the first dark comber of the open sea lifted me up without warning, I sensed the restlessness that lay out there. From out of the dark maw of ocean that went endlessly on below my Plimsoll line came an uneasy feeling. The sea outside this safe harbour was rife with danger. A terrible storm like no other was coming. But the man who controlled my destiny did not sense the danger. He kept stepping with animated feet around my helm, looking now ahead and now quickly astern, but his strong hand never once released its steady grip on my wheel. It was as if he wanted to tie up the winds in the belly of the sails, so eager was he to be away to home with the rest of the schooner fleet.

  He was like a musher who ran behind his team, eager to catch the sleds ahead and hounded by the barking dogs behind. I believe if he had a whip he would have snapped it repeatedly at my sails. But I shared none of the frenzy I could feel in his grip, and for the first time since my launching I did not want to sail forth on my home waters. For when the lights of the old city were hidden inside the protective hills astern, I knew I would never again see the lights of the sheltered land.

  The night pressed down on us in a scowl of racing, darkened clouds. Far behind me I felt the presence of the last of the schooners, the biggest one of the fleet, the Neptune II, as it cleared the safety of the St. John’s Narrows. The winds that had been moderate from out of the south were veering rapidly out of the north and west. The dark thickened with snow and the lights of schooners ahead and astern disappeared. The change in the wind sent an undercurrent throughout the surface layer of ocean, so that there was no pattern to the heightening waves. It was that most dreaded of happenings at sea, when the tide fights a losing battle with a fierce change in wind direction. And now caught in the impending maelstrom was the entire argosy of northern schooners.

  With the wind backing out of the north came a drastic drop in temperature. We were being borne away from the dark land mass to port. The snow that had been a sloppy mix on my deck froze solid, only adding to the weight I had to bear. Green ordered my mainsail down. With the plastered weight of ice, it dropped like a stone from head to clew when the halyards were released, breaking the main boom as it fell, and I felt the pain when my boom broke.

  Sometime during that interminable night of misery, my foresail was reefed in an attempt to bring me into the wind. Green hauled my helm down and shivered me, I came into the wind so keenly. But it wasn’t enough to halt our drift. He ordered another reef put into my lone sail. The crew strained with all their might to carry out the order. It took great courage and much skill to work above my foaming breast. Great walls of water came crashing down without warning. My scuppers were choked with pieces of snow and ice and could not handle all the water. The rest went scurrying over my laden sides in cascading streams of white. The wind howled like a plague of demons through my near-naked rigging.

  A cresting wave higher than all the rest came up out of the night on my port side. Green downed my helm to meet it. But with nearly bare poles and in such a sea, my rudder could not respond quickly enough. The wave broke a short distance away and I thought it would pass under my keel. I was wrong. It lifted my port bow high with a jerked snap, and with its crest breaking again it sent great spindrifts surging across my deck. And when the wave released me and I fell tumbling down, I felt my fifth rib finally crack. Water began seeping in immediately. There was still time to save it—if it were detected. But for now no one knew of my wound and I raised my crippled bow again. But this time it was already laggard with the added weight of cold sea water.

  The day came without sun and the fight for survival continued on that cruel sea. I could not survive such a continuous onslaught, and when my weary bows went down for the last time, the men so valiantly fighting for their lives would go with me. Their only means of escaping, a small lifeboat that had been lashed to my open deck but had already been torn from its moorings and pounded to splinters, vanished over the side.

  The day wore on and soon my continued list to port was noticed. The leak coming up through the planking beneath my broken knee was discovered. The single pump was manned without cease. The men, their feet and legs constantly awash in the icy seas that kept coming over my deck, worked the pump in relieving spells. The water they sucked out of my depths sluiced over the deck with the fresh sea water. But I knew the water that kept bubbling in was more than the crew were able to pump out.

  The day darkened into a murky evening, and almost without knowing the night had come again. And in all that time the hand of my master barely left my polished helm. Though I felt the drain of his great strength resonate from warm blood to cold wood, his determination was resolute. Only death would stop this man’s fight. Night at sea with the sure hand of this man to guide me brought memories of better times. Nights when the friendly seas bore me along chasing a moon that held the winds clutched within the crook of its shiny elbow, when stars without number became entangled in my rigging. Grey pre-dawn mornings when my captain dozed on my helm and great denizens larger than I swam near and stared at me with their great lone eyes before vanishing soundlessly into the depths.

  But now as his feet strained for purchase on my slippery deck I felt a weakness in one of his legs. It was the pain of old war wounds that the constant wet and cold were reviving. Upon a tossing deck awash with water day and night, it was difficult for the crew to notice their captain had a limp, and Frank Green told no one of his war pains.

  The break in my fifth rib widened. The crack ruptured and bulged the planks that clung to it. The sea water eagerly gurgled inside and the men strained harder to keep me afloat. More than ever came the sure knowledge that I would soon founder beneath the weight of these ceaseless seas, and just as sure was the premonition that my captain would also meet his fate on this same ocean.

  Green was more than just one of the usual schooner skippers who could find their way by the magnetic needle, or by-guess-or-by-God method. He was capable of finding our position by shooting the sun with his sextant, or by measuring the angles of stars. But we had seen neither hint of sun or stars nor even lofty moon in all our time at sea. But through it all the faithful crew, under his command, kept my tattered foresail half up the mast and sometimes twice-reefed. He kept me in irons before the gale. He constantly tacked me from starboard to port, like a pig before thunder, in an effort to keep me as near as possible to the land.

  Then, in the dismal pre-light of Sunday morning, my rudder was torn from its metal holdings. The shout from the wheelsman, when my helm went over without my bows answering, brought Green from his cabin, where he had been sleeping fitfully. One of the crew was seated at the forecastle table and, under the murky light from a swinging lantern, was reading from a scarred and well-thumbed black book. I had seen this same man read from the same book on many early Sunday mornings before.

  Without direction from my rudder, my bows bore away before the wind, listing hard to port. The forecastle tilted. The unshaven man dropped his book and dashed toward the steps leading above. Behind him the book fell onto the floor and was afloat in the water that came bubbling up through the floor seams.

  Green ordered the pitiful foresail down to try and correct and slow my drift and dangerous list. But before the sail could be lowered to my washing deck, the lashings holding to my decks the steel barrels filled
with gasoline and kerosene oil let go. The deck was now in turmoil. The heavy barrels were weapons of destruction and could do terrible damage. They could easily kill a man. The men at the pumps jumped and dodged the careening barrels. Green shouted. The crew shouted back. There was nothing the crew could do to stop the deadly toss and roll of loose barrels free upon my deck. Two of the barrels collided and immediately burst open. Their oils poured out over the sides and through my lee scuppers, smoothing the surface of that terrible sea. My starboard side lifted suddenly and on my tilted deck one of the barrels was flung like a missile down upon my port bulwarks. It passed on through, seemingly without resistance. It was accompanied by a crack barely heard above that terrible din. As if in a game of following the leader, several other barrels went overboard through the same hole. The last one of them smashed against the edge of the splintered hole and it, too, released its oily contents into the wild sea. But the calm look was deceiving, mocking, for there was no calmness in the greasy sea that wrestled me away before the wind. When the last barrel disappeared over my heaving side I was relieved, for their weight was gone from my topsides, but it would make little difference now. I was sinking!

  Then I heard the distinctive thresh of propellers come up out of the steely depths below the surface of that windy sea. The sound was coming our way! The men pumped more frantically than ever. They could see that I was taking on water at an ever-increasing rate. No one aboard knew a huge ship was passing somewhere nearby and I had no way of telling him. The sound of the throbbing screw increased. It was nearing us. It was a big ship. I could even hear the cavitations from the propellers as the stern of the ship was frequently lifted out of the water on the huge swells.